The Download: a quantum breakthrough, and the Internet Archive ruling
—Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, explains the rationale behind his government’s plans to restrict social media access for teenagers and children, the Financial Times reports.
The big story
A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?
December 2022
In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes—including a particularly revealing shot of a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sitting on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.
The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label data used to train artificial intelligence.
Earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups. The images speak to the growing practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms. They also reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of. Read the full story.
—Eileen Guo
We can still have nice things
